Watch Anthony Talk to Mark Ockerbloom of Fox 25 News on What to Expect in the Fall 2014 Housing Market

Real estate numbers just released home sales in Massachusetts fell last month while prices continued to rise. What’s behind this and what does this mean for you? If you’re buying or selling a home? Anthony Lamacchia from Lamacchia Realty joins us with some insight as to why this drop in sales but a price spike.

Yeah it’s interesting but it’s not that surprising. What happens is that home sales race, when home sales start to race prices go up after that. Home sales slow down, it takes a few months for price appreciation to slow down– do you follow me? So I think what we’re going to see now that home sales slowed down in July I also think that home sales for August will be down as well you’re going to see this constant price appreciation that we’ve been seeing every month compared to the same month the year before, slow down.

I don’t like hearing that as a homeowner!

It’s not a bad thing

But the numbers, if you put in perspective to where were in 2006 yes we’re not there but if you look where we’ve been since then

That’s right in particular June home prices were up 11% compared to June 2013, July yes home sales were down 4% but prices were up 6%, I mean these are big numbers you can’t just keep doing this every single month, you know the market doesn’t improve like this. If it does, it blows up. That already happened. You know our trajectory here, up little by little you know we’re headed in the right direction and we’ll have some bumps along the way, we are seeing that like I mentioned this summer it’s slower.

What does this mean if you’re looking to sell your home right now?

If you’re looking to sell your home right now you need to be very cautious about how you originally price and you need to pay very close attention to what is on the market around you, what you’re going to compete with: comps. More than ever this entire game is supply and demand so whoever you are competing with you have to look at them and you have to try to look at them in an unbiased way and say, “is my house better than that?” well if your house is the same as that one way to beat them out is to price it a little bit lower than them to attract buyers to you.

What about buyers?

If you’re a buyer you’re in a pretty good position right now not that the market is bad by any means but you know, in early spring we were definitely in a seller’s market. Everybody was talking about multiple offers and the reason is there was less homes on the market. Now there’s 30% or 40% more homes on the market than there were in February and March so buyers have more to choose from buyers are in a good position.

Let’s talk about condos because those have done very well over the last several years. Is it going to continue?

Yes it will, they’ve done well. It’s actually interesting, in July, condo sales were down 4% this was the first month all year that sales were down but I don’t think it’s anything bad like I said you can’t just go up up up every month but I do see the strength of the condo market continuing.

Let’s talk about the overall market in summertime that’s usually when you get the house bought, moved in, the kids situated in school, what about fall good season?

Fall is the second busiest time of year for real estate. Early winter and summer is slower for us this summer was unusually slow with buyer activity, which tells me that this fall will be very busy. So if I was looking to sell I absolutely would put my home on the market this fall, but be cautious about my price and be cognizant of the competition.